From PDF to Podcast: The MIT Tool That Goes Beyond NotebookLMCriticalMynd·Follow5 min read·Just now--NotebookLM is one of Google’s more creative AI products, introduced a couple of months ago. Many people were amazed by its abilities — especially the idea of turning a long text into an interesting conversation between two podcast hosts. NotebookLM offers more than that, such as chatting (Q&A) and even generating mind maps. If you haven’t tried NotebookLM yet, I highly encourage you to experience it yourself. It’s free and really easy to use.— -The ProblemThis is great, but some advanced users, including developers, want more and quickly run into limitations — at least in the free version:You can’t select the hosts’ character.You can’t change the prompt.You can’t select the length or depth of the conversation.… and pretty much anything else that goes beyond uploading the document and telling NotebookLM what to focus on, which was added recently.Most importantly, it has no API… yet (at least not in the free version)— -The SolutionAs we often see these days, for almost every commercial solution, open-source alternatives appear — if not many. The same goes for NotebookLM.When you search on GitHub for NotebookLM, you will find plenty of projects.If you just want to test a solution without installing or configuring anything, there is a Hugging Face space that can do exactly that.Generates an engaging two-host podcast from any uploaded documentMany thanks to the developers of this lamm-mit space:https://huggingface.co/spaces/lamm-mit/PDF2Audio— -What You NeedA Hugging Face account (free)An OpenAI API key. We will be using the TTS API for that.The CostTo get an idea of how affordable inference and TTS can be, in